


Stay

by myticanlegends



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Three-Eyed Raven!Bran
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-02 20:04:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12733380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myticanlegends/pseuds/myticanlegends
Summary: Because Meera can't just leave the show. Not like that.A story of a girl who spent her whole life protecting until it blew up in her face. A story of a girl who fights. A girl who is lost. It's a story of a girl who lost a boy she cared for and a boy trying to get better. They aren't perfect, and they still have lots to face, but they couldn't just end broken.





	Stay

Westeros wasn’t the most magical country. It had it’s threads that witches could pull at, weaving its way through society in small ways, but nothing that couldn’t be glanced over. Flames that spoke prophecy. Ravens that never blinked and stared as if watching every movement. Water that blinded or poisoned. It was so ingrained in society, these small bits of reckless magic, that it never occurred to people there was another way of doing things.

But beyond the wall, dead man walked and rose. The Three-Eyed Raven walked through the past and the future. A tree provided protection and the Children of the Forest worked their magic of ice and life.

Meera never thought she would be introduced to anything beyond the wall. She would likely stay in her castle with her father, mother, and her brother. Probably be married off to some son of a lord for an alliance and then live in that castle.

But that wasn’t what she wanted to do.

When she was young, only just reaching the point where she had begun to develop, she had snuck off into the night, pulling on a pair of trousers and stealing a bow from the armory, and was gone for a week. When she returned, she never spoke of what she had seen. After a while, no one asked. Jojen would sometimes look at her a little longer than usual, so much wisdom in his young age, and sometimes she suspected he knew.

It hadn’t meant to be a troubling trip. Only sometimes Meera couldn’t stand living as a lady any longer and trained with her bow. She would hunt in the forest. Sometimes Jojen would tag along but often she was on her own. Meera liked to be alone.  
She hadn’t been alone that week even if she had meant herself to be.

It started with the stare of a raven in the distance and then fluttering that seemed to follow her. She caught a rabbit and built a fire. She could feel something with her but she couldn’t see what it was or who. Meera had a strong feeling it was a who.

“Jojen?” She asked.

It wasn’t Jojen. It wasn’t anyone.

After eating her rabbit, Meera stomped out the fire, intending to go home. There had been enough adventure for the day and her parents never liked when she was out after dark. It’s not a proper place for young ladies like you, her father often told her. The dark is a dangerous thing.

But then she felt that presence again and it hadn’t scared her.

Meera ended up following it to a river’s edge where a familiar raven was nesting in the trees. It cocked it’s head at her. She tilted her head back to get a better look. She debated climbing the tree or shooting it down but it hadn’t worried her to that point. Instead it let out a loud squawk and dove at her. She ducked in surprise. Something dropped from its claws and onto the ground in front of her. And then the bird was gone.

When she bend down to pick up the object, she found it to be a pin of a direwolf’s head. The Stark family crest. The raven had to have traveled a while to have brought it there.

As unsettling as the whole situation was, the birds and the weird human presence that still seemed to be there, Meera had felt comfort in the pin. A compass, some part of her informed her, to lead you to where you need to go. And just like that, the pin was hers.

She kept it hidden in her skirts when she had them and pinned to the inside of her sack she often took out hunting with her. At night, sometimes she would take it out and look at it. Her father had fought with the Starks, somehow that was how the raven must have found it. Or maybe it had traveled farther through Westeros than Meera could imagine and just thought of it as something shiny to carry.

It felt more purposeful than that. The pin felt like a sign.

Meera ended up doing lots of traveling. It was mostly Jojen who lead them, having figured out his worg abilities and apparently having a higher mission that led them across the north, but Meera found her skills useful for once. There was no need for knitting in the wilderness, instead they had to eat, and she could provide that for them. She could also provide protection when Jojen’s eyes glazed over and he couldn’t move himself. She shielded her younger brother from his seizures and from the sold.

Sometimes at night, she thought about the white walkers he told her about and wondered if she could protect him from those. There was a part of her that knew one day she would have to. She suspected there was a part of Jojen that knew the same.  
For the longest time, it was just the two of them.

Yet, it wasn’t even a surprise when they came across the youngest Stark boys and their companions. Meera could feel the Stark pin against her chest, underneath her furs and positioned above her heart. She didn’t immediately trust them, she couldn’t trust anyone anymore, but she trusted her brother who insisted that this was part of his goal. In fact, they were only a small part in Bran’s goal, which made her feel a bit useless in the scheme of things but she had offered her protection and would stay by her brother’s side through thick and thin.

Brandon Stark on the other hand, she didn’t know what to do with. She supposed he was handsome in a tragic kind of way. The kind of tragic that she suspected he might have grown to be handsome if he hadn’t lost the mobility of his legs, and as a consequence, some of his joy. He was melancholy and intelligent which didn’t call much attention to his lack of ability to use his legs but Meera saw a kindred spirit of the girl she used to be; looking out the window in a castle and longing to hunt or climb. She could see a glimpse of the boy he used to be before falling out a window in the way he watched her climb with a longing smile or how he stared at his legs sometimes like he was trying to move them with sheer force of will. She saw it in the way he ran as Summer or as the birds flying above.

She should probably have given him the pin but she didn’t. She selfishly kept it to herself and it stayed hidden in her furs where it could remind her that she had a purpose too.

They grow older together, she, Jojen, and Bran, if not for a couple years and slowly they began to lose things. First, they lost the company of Rickon, and then they lost any innocence of a world that wasn’t in immediate danger of being overrun by the dead.

She lost Jojen too and frustratingly enough he had known this was how it would end; to die at the hands of the white walkers just a few feet away from shelter just so Brandon Stark could complete his “destiny” or whatever that was. Meera had to slit her brother’s throat and leave him to collapse in the ice. She thought she hated Bran a little bit for that.

She knew she hated Bran for that.

But she also didn’t because he was Brandon Stark of Winterfell and he had grown on her to the point that she would risk her life for him as well. And he knew she would give her life for him and if he didn’t before, he certainly did now, because he became the Three-Eyed Raven which meant that he knew everything. Or maybe he didn’t because the Three-Eyed Raven had no emotion and sometimes she doubted that he could see what she thought when she looked at him.

Meera felt like it obvious sometimes, when she watched Bran in his training or when Bran sat beside her outside the heart tree and they both remembered Jojen falling through the ice on the way there. She cared for him in a different way than her brother. She cared for Bran like there was a spot just for him in her life and she would do anything not just to keep him alive but to see him smile or be happy which became all too rare.

She lost Bran to the Three-Eyed Raven then after having to escape the heart tree. She lost Hodor too. In a way, she had also lost her last bit of her childhood because she had faced death and come out more mature and serious, with more pressure on her survival. And then it became just Meera Reed hiking towards the wall and dragging a sled with what might as well have been a corpse with how much attention Bran gave her.

She understood it, she really did, Bran had always been a curious person and seeing the past, present, and future must have been a tempting thing. But he was immediately consumed with this strange sense of duty and prophecy that Jojen had. Meera wondered if it’ll lead to Bran’s death too and if he knew that it will. If so, he didn’t seem to care. He didn’t seem to care about anything.

But Meera had always been loyal and she cared for what Bran used to be. She cared a lot more than she should considering that he’s technically Prince of the North and had cast aside emotion to become this weird bird thing of fortune and fate. But she remembered who he used to be, the way he would laugh at a joke or dream of climbing trees, and she hoped that he will come back to her.

They made their way to the wall and then they made their way to Winterfell and Bran was home. He didn’t need Meera anymore.

She waited a stupid amount of time waiting for him to ask her to stay when she knew he wouldn’t. He was too busy watching everyone else’s lives and trying to figure out the war.

The day she left, she felt as if she was dragging herself away from something bigger than she was, trying to pull her back in like a magnet. But she couldn’t handle it anymore, the way Bran watched her, as if he couldn’t remember everything she sacrificed to get him to that goddamn tree, and how useless she felt. Her family needed to know about Jojen’s death. They needed to know about the white walkers too.

A thanks was all she got.

Meera wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. She wanted to run home to her family and forget Bran had ever walked into her life and that Jojen was still there.

Thanks for walking into a death trap with me. Thanks for defending me when I couldn’t walk. Thanks for pulling me across an entire forest in the middle of the winter and bringing me back home. Thanks for letting your brother die for me. Thanks for staying by my side even though you probably could have found much better things to do with your life.

Thanks wasn’t enough. She didn’t know what she expected but a simple emotionless thanks didn’t do it.

That bastard.

She left Winterfell on her feet the same way she had travelled for years now. But for the first time since she was a little girl, Meera traveled alone. She felt the cold of her pin brush against her collarbone where she had almost forgot it existed. A raven was watching her unblinkingly from a tree but now she knew what it meant and Brandon Stark did not deserve to still watch her when he had cast her aside.

Meera carefully unattached the pin from her furs and held it up one last time to look at it. A silver direwolf stared back at her. Then she cast it into the snow. What had the Stark’s ever done for her? Why did she still have it?

The raven cawed and swooped at her like it had all those years ago but this time, she didn’t blink. It landed on the ground in front of her and in front of the pin thrown aside on the ground.

“What do you want?” She asked bitterly. “You’re the one who gave me that, right? Take it back. I don’t want it anymore.”

The raven cocked it’s head and picked up the pin with its large beak. For a second, Meera thought it would attempt to give it back but instead it lifted it’s weeks and flew back to the castle, her pin with it. It would likely deliver it to Bran. She probably should have given it to him years ago, she knew he had missed his family back then, but at least he’d have it now.

It made her angry that it would make sense for him to have the final thing she called her own. Now she only had her family left and already one of them had died for the ungrateful boy she still couldn’t bring herself to hate. Or maybe that made her hate him more. And instead of staying, Meera would grow to become the lady of her family’s small piece of land and she would fight the white walkers when they came. In the back of her mind, she knew that was probably how she would die. Die protecting because that was what Meera did, even when they didn’t deserve her protection.

She walked a long time. Sometimes birds would follow but she was too tired to chase them off. When she reached home, she cried and her father did too. Her mother had died while she had been gone. They only had each other.

Meera wondered when the white walkers would come. Soon, likely, but her home was farther from the wall than Winterfell so they were among the last line of defense. She taught women to fight, to shoot with arrows and to swing a sword, and her father trained the men. Sometimes at night, the people would gather in the mead hall and listen to her tell stories of the white walkers and how to fight them. She never mentioned Bran.

Valerian steel could slay white walkers. Fire could kill them too. And Dragonglass could as well but a small land like theirs hardly had dragonglass. Only Meera had Valerian steel, taken from the heart tree in her escape, but when she tried giving her sword to her father, he refused.

“You’ll need it more in the war to come,” he promised.

A month or so after arriving, when tension was high, a lone rider rode into their town and through the gates to approach her father.

“Brienne of Tarth,” Meera greeted in surprise.

“Lady Reed, I apologize we meet again in such circumstances.”

Unfortunately, this was likely the only circumstance they would ever reunite in when they were this close to war. Meera had been sheltered from the latest news of the North recently, dealing with much more pressing issues, but Brienne’s presence meant something more.

“We need soldiers,” Brienne announced to their small counsel. “To defend the Wall, or what’s left of it. We can house your soldiers in Winterfell and I ask permission for your aide in the name of the Starks.”

“We’ve already been training our men. And women. Our family has been loyal to the Starks for centuries, we are not stopping now,” Meera’s father agreed. “We will send all the fighters we can afford.”

That night, those who would fight packed their bags for Winterfell. Meera was pulled aside by her father before she could grab her own supplies.

“You’re not going with them,” he said.

"Father, I can’t do anything here,” Meera argued. “I’ve seen the white walkers, I know how to fight them!”

“You are the last of our family, Meera,” her father said calmly. “And I need someone to keep our people safe… I need you to be safe.”

Meera understood then that the people who left were unlikely to make it back alive. She argued a little bit more and when he didn’t agree, before her father woke the next day, she stole herself a horse. She had a bow strapped to her back, her meager belongings in a sack, and by dawn, she had gathered their small army of hundreds of volunteers and started to follow Brienne across the forest and dry winter lands while others stayed in Greywater in hopes that they would live.

She left a note, hopefully preventing her father from following.

Dear pa, it said. I can’t stay here and do nothing when I’ve seen this threat and know what they can do. The battle needs me and our family needs someone to carry on our name. Take care of those who aren’t going and try not to worry about me. I’ve got my sword and the Starks to protect me. I’ll see you at the end of the war. Be safe. Your daughter, Meera.

She had walked the same path they now travelled, only the other way around, months ago to get away from the Three-Eyed Raven and to find some purpose other than protecting those she’d lose anyway. She hadn’t quite managed either of those things but maybe she could for her father do one for her father.

There was a stone in her stomach when she remembered Bran sitting coldly in his room, staring at the fire as if staring into nothing, and she remembered why she left. She missed him more than ever the closer she got and hated that she still cared. He didn’t care about her. She wished she was the same.

Winterfell was the same as ever, except maybe more crowded, and it was stockpiling for the winter and for war. Oddly enough, this time around she was presented as a lady to the council, Bran’s eldest sister sitting in front of her with a few people at her side.

“Lady Meera,” Sansa greeted. “How pleasant to see you again.”

They hadn’t really known each other so Meera just nodded her respects. “Lady Sansa.”

“You never said goodbye, the last time you left.”

“I didn’t think I needed to.”

What she really meant went unsaid. She didn’t know many people at Winterfell. She only knew Bran and Bran was not himself. She had said goodbye to him anyway and got nothing in return. There had been no one else to tell.

“Brienne can lead your people to the shelters we have set up for them. We’re getting a bit crowded, I hope no one minds.”

“We’re grateful for anything we can get,” Meera said and Sansa nodded as if that were the right answer.

Meera and a couple others in her group, the ones who had been allowed into the grand hall to speak, turned to leave but Sansa spoke up again. “Meera. I hope you find time to visit Bran. He hasn’t been himself lately.”

Meera wanted to comment that he hadn’t been himself longer than lately but she nodded and took her time to settle her people into the small huts and lean-tos that had been set up for soldiers of the war.

Arya, a small fierce girl who Meera had previously found herself instantly admiring, cornered her one night with an impassive face and a hand on a knife. “You’ve been avoiding my brother.”

Meera had. “Your brother can come and see me whenever he’d like.”

Which wasn’t exactly true, the poor boy couldn’t walk, but Meera had seen the ravens for a while now and had come to understand that Bran would always happen to know where she was at. He could see her, but without her physical presence, they could never talk. It was probably for the best.

Arya scoffed. “You’re avoiding him and he will never do anything about it.”

“I could never avoid him,” Meera said, nodding her head towards a raven watching them from a wall. “And he is doing something about it.”

Arya smiled, a wry thing that was almost unnoticeable, and said, “That doesn’t count.”

Meera scoffed right back at her. “Doesn’t it? He’s the Three-Eyed Raven. Why meet anyone in person if he sees and hears what he needs to.”

“He can’t speak as a bird.”

“There’s nothing he would say that I would need to listen to.”

“He’s sulking,” Arya countered.

“He’s always sulking. Have you ever seen him not sulking?”

“He’s sulking more since you left.”

“Then maybe,” Meera hissed. “He should have said something! I was willing to stay if he had only just asked but your ass of a brother just told me thanks and then went back to staring into the fire. I risked my life for him, my brother died protecting him, and he can sulk all he’d damn well please but I got tired of his apathy and he doesn’t need me anymore.”

“He’s still Bran,” Arya said, jutting up her chin. “Sometimes.”

“Sometimes isn’t enough,” Meera said, even though it was. She would kill to see a little bit of Bran back.

She didn’t have to. The next day, he approached her by the weir tree, rolling his chair up to her as she sat looking at the brightly colored leaves like the ones of the heart tree. Her brother was somewhere out there, dead, or maybe among the dead. He had died by a tree just like this one. For a rare moment, Meera prayed that she’d never have to encounter him again. Not in this life.

She prayed she’d see him in the next, however.

“I was rude,” Bran said from behind her. “Last time we spoke.”

His voice was still frank and calm but Meera knew that his presence here was not one motivated by the Three-Eyed Raven.

“Yes,” Meera agreed.

They both were silent for a while as they watched the tree.

“Where’d you get the pin?” Bran asked only a moment after Meera was beginning to wonder if she should had back and leave him in peace.

"The-” the pin. “I’m assuming that was you.”

“My father gave it to me when I was very little,” Bran began and Meera got the hint that this was not a story to interrupt. “He said that one day I was going to be a great Stark. I wanted to be a knight and he told me to always fight with honor and to deliver justice to those who needed it. And then he gave me the pin to remind me. That’s what Starks are supposed to be, you see. Honorable and just.

“I lost the pin the day I fell from the tower. I had forgotten about it until I saw you with it as you were leaving. Do you know why you would you have my pin?”

“I don’t know,” Meera answered.

“When did you get it?”

“In the forest by my home. A raven gave it to me when I was ten. Was it you?”

“It was me,” Bran said. “It will be, at least.”

“Why?” Meera asked.

“I haven’t been very honorable or just. To you. I suppose it was a reminder.”

“Is that all? A reminder?”

“No.”

“Will you tell me what else?”

“One day.”

Meera was fine with one day. She wheeled Bran back to the castle and to his room where he would likely continue this vision hunting and spying. And then she left and immediately missed this version of him where he could talk about being a child and where he trusted her back.

The next day, Bran joined her at the weir tree. And then the next and that day after that. It became a pattern, if only for a week, until Meera received news that the white walkers were approaching. It was time for the final stand.

As Winterfell prepared for battle, Meera sat under the weir tree and sharpened her sword. And then she began to make more arrows. Bran approached only a few minutes later, pulling his own wheelchair forward and over a couple roots, and proceeded to watch her thread the feathers for the arrows.

“The White Walkers will approach Winterfell tomorrow,” Bran said from his chair. Meera didn’t look up.

“Yes,” she agreed, waiting for his inevitable follow-up.

“After you left, I had trouble understanding why I gave you my pin.”

“Justice and honor?” Meera suggested.

“No. Well, yes. It reminded me of that and my actions. But I figured out something else.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s not my pin. It’s your pin.”

Meera glanced up at him from her work and narrowed her eyes, “Your father gave it to you. I’m not a Stark.”

“No. But I gifted it to you. Because you are honorable and just, and you deserve it more than I do. And selfishly, I think I gifted it to you because I wanted you to have it.”

Meera made eye contact with his handsome brown eyes and watched him watching her back from his chair. Her chest hurt. She wanted him to be closer. She wanted him to be farther away. She no longer relied on him but she wanted so so badly to trust in what he said. He seemed to far away for this sort of conversation. The kind of conversation where he mentioned what he thought and what he wanted instead of what everyone else needed.

“Why?” She asked.

Bran was silent a long while before rolling his way over until his chair was right in front of her and she was looking up at him hesitantly curious and he was looking down at her with a genuine seriousness that she hadn’t seen very often.

“Because I need you in my life and without it, I would have forgotten.”

In his outstretched hand was her pin. She glanced at it as if it would move or disappear and when it didn’t, she looked up at Bran again as if asking if he was sure. He didn’t need her, not anymore. They both knew this. This was a different kind of need, the kind of need where you felt empty without the other person and you needed them to fill in the space especially reserved for them.

“What happened to your Three-Eyed Raven sees all and doesn’t need anyone bullshit?” Meera asked.

“Sometimes… I like being Brandon Stark.”

“Brandon Stark can’t walk,” Meera reminded him.

“Brandon Stark had you.”

Meera felt pinpricks on the lids of her eyes but refused to let sentimentality get to her. But instead, she carefully took the pin from him and she knew Bran could tell what she was feeling. Relief. Validation. Want. Forgiveness.

“I never really said sorry, for ignoring all you had done. I am sincerely grateful for everything you ever did. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Jojen was lucky to have you,” Bran spoke again. He still spoke in the same monotone Meera had grown used to but he was hesitant and trying.

“Thank you,” Meera whispered.

“Thank you,” Bran repeated back and he closed his hand around her hand clutching the pin.

“Will I survive tomorrow?” Meera asked cautiously because she doubted he would be here with her unless something had forced Bran’s hand into confronting himself.

“I don’t know,” Bran admitted. “I couldn’t bring myself to look.”

Meera nodded and they both sat underneath the weir tree, hands clasped between them, and when she looked up at the leaves, she remembered Jojen. Jojen had known he was walking into his death but he had done it anyway. So many people had risked their lives to fight the white walkers and now it was her turn.

She stood and let go of Bran’s hand, attaching the pin to her furs, right on the front above her heart. She didn’t know if she would make it tomorrow but she knew she would have to try.

She would fight for Jojen, for her mother, and for Hodor. She would fight for anyone who had lost their lives to the white walkers or who she couldn’t save.

But mostly, Meera would fight for the living and she would fight to return to Bran. She would fight to return to her father as well. Because as long as someone needed her, they would have her protection.

“Bran?” Meera asked. “What do you think you’ll do when this is over?”

“I don’t know,” Bran answered, almost sounding amused as if he hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I’ve got a lot to learn about the Three-Eyed Raven. I suppose I could start there.”

“Ask me what I’d do.”

“All right. What would you do when this is over?”

“I’d go back home to my father. But if you asked, I’d stay here with you.”

“I know,” Bran answered.

“Then how come you never ask?”

Bran closed his eyes calmly. He didn’t seem to be doing anything but thinking at the moment, all his attention still on the conversation. “The future is a curious thing,” he said after a minute. “And sometimes I am not sure how it’ll turn out. I let you leave because this battle needs your father’s armies and you to lead them. But I’m unsure of your position in the overall scheme of things. I’m waiting.”

“Waiting until I live or die, you mean?” Meera asked.

“Yes,” Bran said bluntly. “Either you live or you die.”

“And if I live?”

Bran smiled wryly. “I’d ask you to stay.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm way behind on NaNoWriMo and decided that I'm not writing a novel, instead I'm going to get my words through various short stories and fics. And this one is the first one I came up with. I can't believe there aren't more fics for just Meera and Bran??
> 
> Thanks for reading, giving kudos, commenting, or whatever you did that lead you to reading this note!


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